Louis was obviously not going to start this conversation, so I reached into my pocket and came out with Ralph’s photograph and notebook.
“Ever see this man?” I asked, handing Louis the photograph.
He reached over and took it. In the light from the window Louis looked young, very young. He held the photo in his right hand, a right hand that had kept him heavyweight champion for five years. He still looked like a kid sitting there.
“I seen him,” Louis said. “Someone, don’t remember who exactly, introduced him to me when I was working out at a place called Reed’s Gym maybe a week back.” He handed the photograph to me and I looked at it. Ralph was smiling slightly with his nose and all his teeth and all his hair in place.
“What did he say?”
“Nothin’,” Louis said, squinting at me. “Why you asking this?”
“That’s the man who got his face redecorated yesterday, the guy on the beach, the dead guy,” I explained.
“I tole you,” Louis said, leaning toward me. “I didn’t hit him. It was those two guys.”
“So, what we have here is a coincidence,” I said. “You happen to be running on the beach in Santa Monica and you bump into two guys apparently killing a guy who you met a week ago.”
“Something like that,” Louis said with a touch of suspicion and maybe even anger on his smooth brown face. “I meet a lot of people,” he went on. “Hundreds, maybe thousands. I spend as much time shaking hands as trainin’. You know?”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just letting you in on what the cops are going to check if you have to talk to them.”
“They’ll get me good and for sure,” he said, slumping back in the chair and shaking his head. “Ain’t too many people I can turn to. Marva, my wife, she ain’t talking to me much and she won’t be for sure if she finds out I’ve been fooling around again. My manager Roxie …”
“John Roxborough,” I supplied. “Doing time now for a numbers racket conviction. And your trainer …”
“Chappie,” Louis said, looking down at his hands.
“Jack Blackburn died a few months back,” I went on. “Can I call you Joe?”
He shrugged.
“A lot of people know a lot about you,” I said. “You know that. There are people who even know Blackburn once did time for murder. And I know the cops can tie it all together. Your choice of friends has been a little unfortunate. fell, you even campaigned for Willkie.”
“He’s a good man,” Louis said, looking up as if I might argue with him.
“I was the other guy who voted for him,” I said, “but let’s not forget why we’re here. You want to tell me the name of the woman you were with last night?”
“No,” he said firmly.
“I can find out,” I said, folding my hands on the desk the way Edward G. Robinson did in Bullets or Ballots.
“Don’t find out,” Louis said, standing up. “Jus’ you find out who killed that man, find out fast, and keep me out of it. I get mixed up with this, a lot of people are gonna get hurt bad. My mother, Marva, my brothers, sisters, people, mostly Negro people who think I’m somethin’. This ain’t the way I wanted it. It just happened. I don’t have the education and I don’t have people to help me through it now, but I mean something to people. I wish I didn’t. Lord I wish I didn’t sometimes, but you got to learn to live with what you got. You gonna help me?”
“I’m going to help you,” I said.
“Thursday, that’s four days, I got to go back to Fort Hamilton in New York. Got an exhibition for the Army. You get this all put away by then. You find who did it.”
“I’ll try,” I sighed.
“That’s all anyone can ask you,” he said and stuck his hand into his back pocket. He pulled out a wallet, reached into it, and grabbed six or seven bills. “Here,” he said, holding them out to me. “You need more, let me know. You can leave a message for me at the Braxton Hotel. You know where that is?”
“I know,” I said, taking the money and counting it.
“My leave is over Thursday,” he added, putting the wallet away.
“Hold it,” I said as he turned to the door. “This is seven hundred bucks.”
He stopped and reached for his wallet again. “How much more you need?” he asked,
“It’s too much. Three hundred will be more than enough for a few days of work.”
“Keep it all,” Louis said, putting his wallet away. “You already earned most all of it last night.”
He left, and I sat there looking at the seven hundred-dollar bills, the photograph of Ralph, and the black notebook.
Twenty minutes earlier I had been facing Grumman and a crap-brown uniform. Now I had more money than I’d had in years. Hell, I had more money than I’d ever had. It was tough to pull my eyes away from the cash and look at the notebook. I was tempted to let my eyes pause on the photograph for a second to thank Ralph for the windfall, but I went for the book.
It was filled with names, numbers, addresses, all printed neatly in the same hand. I imagined Ralph at a big desk in a big room with a green Waterman pen, neatly printing the name of his killer in the small book. Sure, I had no real reason to think the killer’s name might be in front of me, but it was the best way I had to go. The problem was that there were too damn many names. Some were businesses, but I couldn’t eliminate them. I was considering calling in help. I had the money to do it. It was something new for me, and I might have gone that way if I hadn’t found something on the page of Ps that hit me. “Parkman, Al,” was nothing special. The name did tickle some memory in me, but I couldn’t place it. After Parkman’s name was a comma, followed by “Reed’s Gym,” the name of the gym where Louis had been training, where he had met Ralph. No surprise there, but why had Ralph put Louis’s name in parenthesis on the next line? Not only was the name Joe Louis darkly printed, but it was underlined. Joe Louis seemed to mean a lot to Ralph Howard, though Ralph Howard apparently meant nothing to Joe Louis. Louis had said that the two men he had seen near the body looked like they had been boxers, and Anne had said that the guy who tried to run Ralph down had looked tough. Maybe it wouldn’t go anywhere, but it was something to start with. I took a half hour to copy all the names, addresses, and phone numbers in Ralph’s notebook. Then, as I was reaching for the phone, it rang.
“Toby Peters investigations,” I said.
“Who was the nigger?” came Meara’s voice.
“Let’s start again, maggot mouth,” I said sweetly. “You got a question? Ask it like something nearly human.”
“If I were there, I’d shove a roll of toilet paper up that smart mouth of yours,” he spat.
“Only an asshole like you is interested in toilet paper, Meara,” I said sweetly again. “You got something to ask?”
“The nigger,” he repeated.
I hung up, pocketed Ralph’s notebook and photograph, and put the seven bills in my wallet after folding them neatly. The phone rang again and I considered not answering it, but I did.
“Toby Pe—” I began.
“The Negro gentleman,” Meara hissed. “Who was the Negro gentleman on the beach with you yesterday, the one standing over the goddamn body.”
“What gentle—” I started, but he interrupted again, doing a lousy job of holding his temper.
“We found two kids,” he said. “Two girls who live a few houses down from your former wife. They saw you. They didn’t know Ralph Howard was dead. They know now. Who was he?”
“Just a guy running on the beach,” I said. “He saw the body and me and asked if I needed help.”
“They say he was a big guy,” Meara pushed on. “Howard was messed pretty bad. And what’s a ni … Ne-gro doing running on the beach in goddamn Santa Monica? Who runs on the beach?”
“I don’t know why people run on the beach,” I said, looking up at the crack in my ceiling. Today it looked like the Nile complete with tributaries.
“I want a description, Peters,” Meara said.
/> “So you can find this man and have a nice, friendly talk with him, all about racial problems, the—”
“Peters,” he said, breathing hard, “I can make your life turtle shit. You know that. I can lean on that ex-wife of yours like a Yucca tree.”
“She can take it,” I said nonchalantly. I didn’t want him to know that he had a wedge. He’d drive it in and tear me in half.
“We might have to see,” he said. “Meanwhile, I think I’ll go with you as a suspect. That way we can have a friendly talk or two. I’d like that.”
“I would too, Meara. You set it up with my secretary.”
“You give me a name or a description or I pull you in, Peters,” he shouted.
“Joe Louis,” I said. “There, you pulled it out of me. It was Joe Louis. The champ was jogging down the beach and stopped to lend a hand. I feel better now getting that off my chest. You ever thought of being a Catholic priest, Meara?”
“I love jokers,” Meara said, trying to pull himself together again. “I like to bend and tear them and throw them away. We don’t need jokers in the deck, Peters. Nobody misses ’em.”
“Depends on the game you’re playing, Sergeant. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a client.”
“If you—” he started, and I hung up.
Shelly was sitting in his dental chair reading an old professional journal when I came out. The phone rang in my office but I ignored it. Shelly shook the magazine, dropped some ashes on his jacket, and shifted his pudgy body to let me know he was sulking.
“Change the sign on the door, Shel,” I said. “Get rid of the discreet.”
“You’re not a friend,” he said. “That man needed dental work.”
“Shel, someday you’ll think back on this and thank me,” I said, going to the office door. “That man was Joe Louis. Do you know what he might do to you if you destroyed his teeth?”
“I know who it was,” Shelly shot back defiantly like a small child. “And I would have given him a mouth to be proud of, a mouth that would go around the world letting everyone know, the great and the humble, that Sheldon Minck had worked on a champion. You don’t get that kind of opportunity very often, Toby.”
I reached into my wallet and pulled out a hundred. “You got fifty bucks, Shel?” I asked.
He looked at me over the top of his glasses with curiosity. “What if I have?” he asked cautiously.
“I’ll give you a very new C-note and pay back the money I owe you and three months rent.”
He scrambled out of the chair, casting his dental journal in the general direction of San Diego. It took four grunts to get his wallet out and some frantic counting to find fifty dollars. We made the exchange.
“Then I’m forgiven?” I said as he examined the bill.
“Well,” he said, dragging the word out. “Yeah.”
“Good, then get the sign changed while I’m gone.”
And out the door I went.
On the way down the stairs I met Jeremy and Alice Pallice carrying massive cartons upward from the second floor.
“Toby,” Jeremy said pausing. On his right shoulder was one large carton. Another was cradled under his left. Alice’s burden was the same. “These are the covers of the book. Just delivered. Would you like to see them?”
“Sure,” I said.
Jeremy put down the two cartons and reached into one of them. Alice stood smiling and waiting with her burden of what must have been a hundred and fifty pounds. I took the slick sheet of thick paper Jeremy handed me. It was dark and shiny with the title in white.
“Doves of a Winter Night,” I read. “Nice. I like the outline of the bird, too. How many books are you printing?”
“Three thousand,” Alice said below us.
“You can sell three thousand books of poetry for children?”
Jeremy smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. If he had closed the hand, my shoulder would have been avocado pudding.
“We do not plan to sell them, Toby,” he said. “We will give them away. These are dark times, Byronic times. Times swirling in the mists of world terror. I have no desire to profit from despair. These poems should, may help some children feel better about themselves and the possibility for the future.”
“We have hope for the future,” Alice said, looking admiringly at Jeremy.
“And what about your business?” I said to Alice.
“Oh,” she said, beaming, “I’m still doing the dirty books. A woman’s got to make a living and we’ve got thousands of servicemen gobbling up pornography all over California. Money I make on my regular stock, part of it, can go into Doves of a Winter Night.”
Somewhere below us in the lobby a drunk who had wandered in was singing “Night and Day.” Jeremy sighed deeply. “I’ll take care of that when we get the covers put away,” he said, picking up the boxes. “Keep the cover.”
“Thanks,” I said, moving down past Alice. “Good luck with the Doves.”
When I reached the lobby, the drunk was sitting against a wall. He was as pale and skinny as any crack in the cold tile under him. He was belting out “In the roaring traffic’s boom” in a not bad imitation of Fred Astaire.
“Got a tip for you, Fred,” I called as I went for daylight. “Dance your way out of here before a very big man comes down those stairs and sets a new record for the javelin throw with you as the javelin.”
Fred tipped his hat to me, grinned toothlessly, and didn’t miss a beat as he went on with “in the silence of my lonely room, I think of you night and day.”
I had been feeling pretty good coming down the stairs, but the drunk’s words reminded me of Anne, and I lost some of my edge. I tucked the cover of Doves of a Winter Night under my arm and headed down the street for Manny’s taco stand. It was early and I had downed a good-sized breakfast, but I was flush with money and a good bad meal consisting of a pair of Manny’s tacos and a Pepsi would put me right again.
Two tacos and a Pepsi later I was ready for Al Parkman and Reed’s Gym. I got into my Ford after telling Arnie that I wanted him to prepare for fixing the gas gauge, and I headed out toward Figueroa.
I flipped on the radio, avoided hitting an old guy crossing the street against the light, and listened to a static-broken Conga version of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” played by Xavier Cugat.
3
Reed’s Gym was just where Ralph’s notebook said it would be, on Figueroa near Adams. I’d passed it hundreds of times. Ralph didn’t have the name quite right, however. It was REED’S SOLDIER’S GYM. The sign was old and faded. It looked as if the letters had once been gold against a green background. Now it was just letters and chipped paint. The entrance was a narrow door between an appliance store and a movie theater, the Lex, which was showing My Gal Sal. The theater wasn’t open yet. It was only a little after one or so, but Reed’s was open. I could hear the sound of men talking, grunting, swearing, laughing, above at the top of the sagging wooden stairs.
I hadn’t called ahead. True, a call might have told me if Al Parkman was there, but it would also have told Al Parkman I was coming. As it turned out, Parkman was there, but first I had to get past the pug at the door.
“Ten cents,” he said. He was wearing a white T-shirt that had REED’S printed on it in black. He was also wearing two of the most convoluted ears I had ever seen on a creature claiming to be a member of the human race. He really didn’t say “Ten cents” either. I had to figure it out from the context and his extended hand. What he said was more like, “Tessn’s.”
I gave him the dime.
“Locker and towel’s another dime,” he said.
He was sitting on a stool, his back to the gym. When he spoke, it looked as if he was having a bit of trouble remembering the words, which he must have said at least thirty times that day alone, judging from the sweating bodies behind him.
“No thanks. I’m just watching today.” I grinned.
“You’re a little old for fightin’ anymore, anyway,” he said, l
ooking at me under eyelids weighted down with scar tissue.
“You got it there,” I agreed. There was a ring in the far corner of the loft. Men, mostly white, were punching bags, jumping ropes, gabbing. Other guys in shirts were milling around or watching the two in the ring, who were going through the motions. Something looked wrong with the scene, but I couldn’t finger it.
“You’re China Rogers,” I said to the battered face at the door. He did something with his face that was supposed to be a smile.
“I used to be,” he said. “Ain’t no more. Now I handle the door here. Know what I mean?”
“I saw you fight Packy Carl for the California middleweight title in …”
“September 4, 1916, Stockton,” he answered. “Stopped him in the fifth with a combination. Voom, voom, right to the gut. Always went for the gut. I remember every punch I ever threw, every punch. Don’t ask me what I done this morning, but every punch in eighty-three fights I could tell you, believe me.”
“I believe you,” I said. “Hey, is Al Parkman around today?”
“Every day,” Rogers said. A kid, who looked like a Mexican about sixteen or seventeen, came up the stairs and handed Rogers two dimes and walked past me. China Rogers examined the change.
“Where is he, Parkman?” I asked.
“Back in the corner, by the ring,” Rogers said. “Little guy with a mustache. Nice duds. You’ll see him. But he’s not taking on any fighters old as you. Needs ’em bad, but guys like us is too old.”
Then it hit me. I knew what was strange about Reed’s Soldier’s Gym. All the boxers looked like high school kids or their fathers. The young guys were all gone, gobbled up by the Army or Navy.
“I’ll see you around, China,” I said.
“You really saw me fight Carl?” he asked, looking at me with a grin that showed broken teeth.
“You were great,” I said.
Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) Page 4